Mentoring to build workforce diversity
How Insight built a mentorship program for women data scientists with Clover Health
The value of sponsorship programs
Recruiting a diverse group of employees will only get you part of the way towards building a genuinely diverse, equitable, and inclusive team. If employees don’t see a path for growth, or don’t feel that your organization is invested in their development, they will move on. Beyond the basics of implementing anti-discrimination policies, bias training, and clear, bias-free decision-making processes for evaluation and promotion decisions, companies need to invest in specific efforts to support the retention and advancement of their diverse workforce.
“Sponsorship is so key because it’s about identifying people that senior staff and leaders can bring up through the ranks.” — Felicia Jadczak, co-CEO and Head of DEI at She+ Geeks Out
Programs that pair individuals with senior leaders can help open doors, increasing their chances for promotion or being included on critical projects. It can also provide a mechanism for employees to identify visible role models and build stronger networks. While the mentors don’t have to be from the same background as their mentees, it definitely helps boost all of the positive impacts that a sponsorship program can have.
Clover Health, a patient-centered healthcare technology company, is a great example of how a growing company can create effective initiatives to hire and retain a diverse workforce, including internal working groups for women. One of these groups was struggling to find enough mentorship support from senior women within the data science domain at Clover Health, to say nothing of mentors with similar life experiences or work challenges, e.g. women of color.
In response, Jenny Yang (Insight alumnae from our Data Science program in Silicon Valley) who leads Clover’s Women in Data Science group reached out to Insight to see if we could help. We agreed to collaboratively build out a mentor-matching program for them in exchange for Clover contributing to a scholarship fund for supporting Insight Fellows from backgrounds underrepresented in the data and tech ecosystem.
Building a network of mentors
We canvassed our vast alumni network (3,500+ former Fellows) and got to work.
Lacey Cope, Insight’s Head of Coaching & Development, and Stephanie Mari, our Director of Talent Development, established a program of pre-work so that mentees in the program could develop a clear plan for the type of mentorship they were seeking. We then hosted a remote speed-networking event for the mentees and mentors to connect. From there, we arranged for the pairs that found a good match to continue meeting in a semi-structured way for several months, providing a framework and periodic check-ins to ensure the experience was productive for all participants.
Who were these Insight alumni mentors? They are women working as Data Scientists, Senior ML Engineers, Tech Leads, and Managers on areas like fraud, AR/VR, compliance, brand health, customer analytics, and cloud platform engineering at companies including Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Square, StitchFix, Mozilla, as well as founders and executives from cutting edge startups.
What were the mentees looking for in this experience?
What were the mentees looking for? They mostly wanted to match with mentors who had experience balancing life concerns (family, immigration, finances) with a successful career. They were also looking for mentors with specific professional skills in the areas in which they most wanted to keep growing. These included strategic decision making, communicating with stakeholders, and staying up to date with techniques in data science. Here’s how a few of them put it:
“My long term goal is to get help in moving my career in a more technical direction and in becoming a more satisfied data scientist. Being a more satisfied data scientist could involve shifting the focus of my career path or just my feelings about it.”
“It isn’t that I want to copy what my mentor is doing, but would like to copy techniques they used (or can identify in hindsight) for achieving those things.”
They wanted to use their mentorship time for things like: discussing the type of career path they want to be on (technical IC lead vs team management); scope ideas for how to move their careers in a more technical direction; gain insight into the career path of someone who is happy and successful in their data science work; and learn about balancing the immediate demands of their current roles with the projects or skills they’d like to develop as part of their longer-term career goals.
During their sessions, the mentees sought advice on many topics ranging from how to better navigate office politics and figure out what work is considered high priority and valuable to their team, to learning what type of skills they should be developing outside of work.
Progress so far & future plans
So far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the mentors and mentees. We are encouraged to see early signs of the mentees making progress towards the professional and technical goals they set for themselves. We are also excited to see how these relationships continue to develop over time. Looking ahead, we plan to share an update on lessons learned from this experience and also hope to measure its impact — both for Clover Health’s team and for the alumni in Insight’s network.
We’d love to hear from you on how you’ve helped support junior team members from underrepresented backgrounds. As our community of Insight alums continues to grow, we are excited to build out more opportunities for them to share their valuable expertise as thought leaders and support DE&I initiatives.
